Containers used to market beverages require great care in presenting the same to the fillers to assure integrity of the structure and freedom from contaminating objects and substances. This is especially true when it comes to the use of returnable container which have undergone hard usage and which may have been used to catch waste substances, smoking stubs and ashes, and other objects, some of which are difficult to remove and some are located in the container in areas hard to inspect.
The market for beverage containers is immense and requires much more rapid inspection to develop the volume of containers needed to meet the demand and keep the filler equipment fully supplied. Consequently high speed apparatus is called for and equally high speed inspection devices are needed. To meet this challenge of large capacity inspection, the light transparent containers are exposed to a diffused light source which is passed through the container to produce an illuminated image which, by means of a lens system, is analyzed by a television scanning system. A system of this character is able to process container images for foreign objects by scanning containers from different sides at approximately ninety degrees of rotatory displacement. While vast numbers of containers need to be inspected, the apparatus hereof remained free of bulk and space consuming size through a unique arrangement of turret means to move the containers successively through the inspection stations in a high speed flow and to carry out the inspection by a single inspection unit.